THATCHERISM — ROLLING BACK THE WELFARE STATE*

Stuart Hall

This about politics as a theory of interruptions, and what I want to talk about
is how the new right interrupted a very well-established political consensus.
I will say something about that process as such, first of all, and then try to
speculate about some deductions we may want to draw from the particular
example, about the native political ideology, and the functioning of ideology.
Thatcherism, is simply a way of talking about the programmes of the new
right, or the radical right, or the monetarist right which has made fitful
appearances elsewhere in the world, but which is very fully established in
Britain since the 1979 election at which the Conservative Party led by Nlrs ,
’I’hatcher came back to power. And perhaps I ought to establish the parameters
of the problern. It came back to power in 1979 with a very substantial victory
which, if you believe the psephologists, was based on a considerable pene-
tration of conservative support in the organised industrial working class. It
is not the only sector of the electorate which supported her. Of course that
is nothing new, because between a quarter and a third of the British working
class has always voted Conservative. So the kind of penetration achieved by
Thatcherism is over and above that base of deferential Conservative support
which popular Conservatism has been able to establish and maintain in the
working and lower middle classes ever since the beginning of the century.
There are also some other worrying indicators; fvr instance, the support for
Thatcherism both in the ’79 election and since, amongst those people who
have been unemployed for a year or longer. And, at that time, a significantly
larger support for Thatcherism amongst women than amongst men, although
that is one of the indicators that has shifted over the period -

a period in
which not many of the indicators are shifting. Now the gender nature of the
support for Thatcherism has considerably changed, and there are more men
than women who are currently in the between 13% and 14% lead which the
Thatcher Conservative party has established over its electoral rivals after 4
years -

with 3’/z years in power and an unemployment rate running at 33/4

million officially. I don’t know what your situation is, but in England there
is a kind of competition as to whether the crime rate or the rate of unem-
ployment is a more manipulated figure. Three and three quarter million people
unemployed means certainly 4 million unemployed, if you count the numbers
of people who don’t register for one reason or another, who aren’t allowed
to register because they don’t have permanent addresses, the numbers of
women who have been in part time occupation, who have come out of it and
who don’t count as the respectable and proper unemployed, and so on. So
it is a mammoth figure and one which is coupled with a period of very serious

6
industrial and economic recession, not just the fall-back in economic pro-
ductivity and activity, but in some areas of society, something beginning to
approach the decimation of the industrial base. In the north-east and the north-
west, for instance, in some important sectors of industry, it is not just a matter
of tying the doors of the factory gates closed for a while until something starts
up again. They are actually pulling the buildings down, mothballing them;
important sectors of steel, for instance, have been closed in ways which
effectively make those people who used to work in them retired for good.
So, one has a picture of serious industrial de-industrialisation; of long term
economic trends operating against the British economy, of very widespread,
serious, deep cuts in the whole structure of the welfare state and the social
services, of a high running rate of unemployment, and a continuing popular
support for Thatcher including a substantial support from the working class
itself. That is the political conumdrum that I want to address. How did that
come about, how is it sustained and maintained? It runs right against what
I would call the naturalistic trends in political and social analysis, historical
analysis. What one would expect has been consistently, in a sense, faulted
in this period, and it has left, as you might imagine, a considerable wake of
puzzlement because people do not know quite how to’explain it. Well I want
to try and describe a little bit more what is the process by which this kind
of ascendancy has been established, and the process by which what occupied
the political space before, has been disestablished. But I also want to try and
draw some longer term deductions from this, about the nature of political
processes.

I think one has to go back to the period in which the post-war consensus was
established. Since the retirement of the reactionary wing of the Conservative
party to its back benches, immediately after the war, there has been a very
broad political consensus of a broadly social democratic kind. What I mean
by that was that people came out of the social and political mobilization which
went on during the 1930’s and the war, and the legacy of that was not some
propensity to raging socialist revolution, but it was a very strong popular
upsurge which had certain well defined limits to it, and well defined targets.
It was not prepared to go back to the 1930’s when massive numbers were in
unemployment and had no forms of social benefit. It was not prepared to go
back to the Baldwin era in which there were not guaranteed state supports
for a whole range of social and civil rights. They were not prepared to go
back to a period when the management of economic policy was simply handed
back to capital, which could do what it wanted and was in a strong position
and able to use its position to decimate and undermine the position of the
working class etc.
There were certain targets established during the course of the popular mo-
bilization of the war, which is not, I think, understood as having a very

7
profound popular character. The nature of that war itself, though it didn’t lead
to an overturning of the political system, did establish a very profound new
basis, new reference points. And those were, broadly speaking, of the social
democratic kind -

by which I don’t mean that they necessarily were those

which the labour movement or the political movement over a long period of
time had consciously established. Many people have said that the welfare
state was very much more imposed own the Labour party after its 1945 election
than, as it were, constructed by it. It was a much broader programme or
target, and those of you that are interested in political mobilization might
briefly think of a war of an old kind, as a means which sufficiently disrupts
old social relationships and allows people to conceive certain alternatives
which brings about very important shifts.

I3uring~the war the Beveridge plan, which in effect laid out the kind of skeleton
of the modem welfare state, became a focal point for people in the army, for
people in evacuation, in social institutions which had never had any political
focus at all. People began to discuss its provisions. Lots of people were against
some of the provisions, but nevertheless it became established as a kind of

target of popular mobilization.

Now the right, and Churchill (with his immense authority as a result of the
conduct of the war), couldn’t conceive of a period after the war when he
would be voted out of office. Some peoplc with long political memories will
remember Churchill riding across Turkey or shooting at Peter Potts in the East
End of London etc., and will remember that he was really a regenerate social
reactionary, whatever his national status. Some people quietly stored that
away in the back of their minds: &dquo;Never ~gair~. &dquo; And the British do have,
in spite of all the propaganda, a slightly ambivalent view of Churchill good
for the war, but not good for the peace disintegrating by the time we come
-

to the end of the Churchillian regime. He had actually to be, literally, materially,
supported by his doctors, and guided into the House of Commons where he
made a ringing nationalist speech etc., and guided out again. He was no longer
in command, either physically or politically, of the terrain. It had passed from
his keeping in another direction, and the direction was, broadly speaking, a
social democratic one -

the social democratic consensus. I mean by that,

that everybody who was in the political game, on the right or the left, kind
of tacitly put their signatures to a set of historic compromises. They agreed
that capitalism would not be dismantled, but crucial sectors of industry had
to be taken into public action. They agreed that there would not be a kind
of total, universal state, but there would be a very substantial increase in the
provisions which the state made, in relation to a range of social needs. That
included pensions, it included unemployment benefits, it included, after a
while, child benefits, but the centre piece of it all was the struggle which
social democracy had with the entrenched professions, with the medical profes-

8
sion. The construction of the national health service was a kind of token of
what the welfare state would do; established, not on a means test basis, but
on a universalist basis, countering the whole pattern in the l Os, ’20s and
’30s in which health and disease had been distributed in the population in a
systematically class pattern -
it was an attempt to break that and to install
as an increased social right, the right to access to the best possible medical
services which could be provided. So that was part of the agreement.

As well, there are other parts of it. There is a commitment to full employment
which is very much the commitment to liquidate the ’30s and the terror of
mass unemployment which had scourged the country in that period. There
is a commitment to Keynesian forms of planning and economic management
etc. And there is, generally speaking, a commitment to a kind of reform going
in the direction of equality of opportunity.

It is partly as a result of changes made by the Conservatives before they left

office and during the war, when they were very much in the leadership of
the coalition government, and by the Labour government in the period after
that, that the comprehensive school was introduced into the public system.
(There is no need to remind you that our public system is really private. It
is a public system I am talking about, it is the state system of education.) So
there is this commitment not only in the political, welfare state and economic
and industrial areas, but in other areas as well, especially, for instance, in
the arena of education. The reference point established was not by way of
a universal consensus that the comprehensive school was the best thing that
ever happened since sliced bread, but simply that that was what the public
system was going to be. Indeed those were the terms in which the post-war
working class agreed to settle their differences, within the framework of the
state rather than outside it. And since I am now talking about the state for
the first time let me add one other element that was central to that consensus
-

the alliance with the western powers, NATO. Labour has been as committed
to NATO as it was committed to the comprehensive school, and yes, it is a
part of the same pattern. Full employment, Keynesian state, welfare state,
mixed economy, minimal public ownership, comprehensive education, gen-
eral equality of opportunity, membership of the &dquo;Free West.’9

Now whether you think or not that that is a mixed political programme, it
was the basis on which the ’wets’ of both sides, ’wet’ labour and ’wet’
conservatism, agreed to settle their differences. Did they like one another?
Not a bit of it -

although parliamentary life in a period of consensus does

create strange and bizarre cross alliances, and there were times when there
was a great fondness for the central figures of consensus on the right, among
people on the left. They talked about Rab Butler, for instance, with consid-
erable fondness, as Butler had made one of the major steps in the direction

9
of the comprehensivisation of education but more, Butler offered himself
-

up at every Conservative party conference, as the token of this liberal dem-

ocratic consensus, to his own back benchers so he went into the Con-
-

servative conference hall on the Tuesday when the ritual votes a) against more
black immigration and b) in favour of hanging, birching, torture, the stocks
were moved, and in his pillar-like way he received the criticisms from the
back benches, he smiled at the blue rinse ladies, he addressed the small
business clerk on one side, he soothed them, he told them that things weren’t
so bad, the crime rate wasn’t so bad really -

generally things were alright.

The left had a lot of respect for Butler who came out of that tradition, who
then went into the Conservative Party and refashioned it, and kind of built
this whole historic compromise into the fabric of the party -

marginalizing
the free enterprise, small business, free market, free hooters as it were, plus
the hanging and flogging lobby. It kept them at bay, let them out for a little
bit of a walk around every year, you know, then put them back in the pen.

This struggle for the balance of forces within the Conservative Party was
matched by a similar struggle inside the Labour Party. Because, of course the
Labour Party, as you know, is sometimes called a broad church, i.e. it has
its cults, and it has its non-conformists and it has its established wings, etc.
It has always functioned by a lot of discussion and argy-bargy between them.
But the nerve centre of the people really deeply committed to this consensus
on the part of the Labour Party was in fact the centre the modemisers
of the centre right, what is now called the Crosland-Gaitskell wing. And one
of the understandings between the ’wet’ right and the ’wet’ left was that both
had their wild extremists on the outer wing, because Labour also had its
&dquo;blue-rinsed ladies&dquo;
--

they were its old traditionalist Tribunite left who

believed in massive upsurge, in insurrectionist policies at some point, in the
taking of power by the working class.
Figures like Crosland really regarded Butler and himself, or what was rep-
resented by what was then called Butskellism -

the combination of Butler’s

policies and Gaitskell’s policies -

as really what modem capitalism would

look like. And this was stamped, this political agreement was stamped, with
a kind of cultural consensus about what it ought to look like. Roy Jerkins
who is currently the leader of the SDP - Roy Jenkins conjured up in the
middle of this period when he was Home Secretary, a kind of image which
is also there in Book called the Future of socialism, and it is about
a sort of slow transition between English suburbia and outer San Francisco.
America without the brashness, with humane welfarism, modem capitalism,
and modern managerialism. Of course, the big bits had to be run by the
government, you wouldn’t give them electricity and so on, you didn’t make
any profits out of that, but you underpinned the economy in this way and
then used very sophisticated Keynesian strategies to pay off the working class,

10
and pay off everybody else, because in the post-war boom and expansion you
had the margin in which to do that. And indeed, people 3~ow looking back
at that historic compromise of the post-’45 period, say about it that so long
as there was a margin for redistribution available to the British economy, so

long as it generated a kind of surplus, it was possible to keep the system

afloat.

Nobody was wholly satisfied with it, it didn’t touch anything like the structural,
strategic problems of the British economy - which didn’t start in 1939 or
’29 or ’19 or even ’09, but, in my view, started shortly after the Great
Depression of 1867 or 8 or 9. It’s an historic problem, it’s the problem of
a first-stage industrial capitalist society which never had the nerve to enter
the second stage, forget about the third, which is just burgeoning in green
sites around Britain, occupied mainly by the Japanese. So we are out of the
historic game of modern capitalism for a very long time. This strategy was
not one of doing anything about that, it was a strategy of managing the
economy on the margins of modernity. But nevertheless, in the post war
period, for a whole lot of complicated reasons, including the fact that the
Americans lent us a lot of money, we did manage to generate a consumer
boom which began, not to change or transform (those are too strong terms),
but to erode and modify the social face, the face of social relations in Britain
in the ’50s and ’60s. It did give the sense, first of all, that there was a lot
of space around, and that life was easier, and the liberal, the social democratic
consensus was beginning to pay off. There was a health service for the poor;

nobody was marching up and down without jobs for very long, and so on.
It was genuine ... it had a very distinct political identity -

political, social
and cultural identity, and because it is not strong at the moment, it would be
quite incorrect to suggest that it wasn’t a distinct formation.
It was, I think, in the period immediately after the war, won on the outer
reaches of the achievements of early social democracy, and it was the social
democratic programme of that period, more or less fully fulfilled. If you
wanted to pass beyond that you would have had to strike agreements and
understandings in a much wider and quite different arena of social and political
life. But as soon as the economic margin started to be eroded, that is to say,
as soon as you get into the era of what was called Stop-Go, over which a
conservative Prime Minister, Mr. Macmillan, presided for a very long time
-

Macmillan is my personal political hero, who managed the transition into

the post-war economy in Britain by not recognizing it at all. He hardly looked
in its direction, except every now and again he got somebody, usually Mr.
Butler, to put in place a budget which, you know, adjusted the things that
you could win in the next election. And he left it alone. He was busily flying
off to Moscow and so on. He was the person who organized the slogan &dquo;You
never had it so good -

vote conservative and have it better&dquo; and he was a

11
magician, under him the capitalist system seemed to move with no hands at
all, moved by its own momentum. But, by the time you get to the early ’60s,
you get into a period when there are really serious problems with the balance
of payments, and there are serious problems about the state of sterling, and
some of the economic problems of the economy are beginning to come home
to roost, and there, as always -- I forget who it is who said &dquo;the crowns of
kings topple before their heads do&dquo; - in Britain and Western Europe we
frequently have a sex scandal before we have the political culmination, and
there is a wonderful moment in the early 1960s, in the middle of the Profumo
affair, which brings together all the seedy side, and underlife of social de-
mocracy ; a soviet spy, a ritzy prostitute, the Cecil household, Rackman, a
Notting Hill-North Kensington housing brigand, whose men are patrolling
Notting Hill and beating up black tenants. The whole of them gather into the
Profumo crisis, and there is a ponderful moment when Profumo, as a minister
under h4acmillan ,_ Iies to him about whether he has been sleeping with, I can’t
remember which of them -

anyhow he didn’t tell the truth, and Macmillan

said &dquo;he lied to me, I do not understand young people today&dquo; and this is the
end of the Conservative phase, and the beginning true social democracy.
After that social democracy is fully in the saddle, we have the elevation of
Harold Wilson to office in 1964, and the &dquo;white heat of the technological
revolution&dquo; in which workers by hand and brain, manufacturers and labourers,
were going together to seize the scientific revolution and remake the world.

From there onwards the social democratic consensus (which didn’t require
a Conservative administration, and
parts of it were perfectly well run by the
Conservatives in the ’50s) but after that it becomes identified with Labour,
it is Labour’s period in office from ’64 to ’70 and then ’74 to ’79 which is
thought to be the period when the true political inheritors of this consensus
were in office. I remember the period in 1959 when Macmillan won the
election on the ’you never had it so good’ slogan and Labour went into one
of its deep navel-inspection processes, in which it said, &dquo;had the working
class disappeared, now they had stopped wearing cloth caps&dquo;. &dquo;Under-
r~ia~ed &dquo;, Gaitskell said in his wonderful speech in 1959, &dquo;totally undermined,
by the telly and the fridge and the small car and the women’s magazines &dquo; .

I mean this is a kind of acknowledgement that permissiveness was beginning

to run through the land and dismantle some of the older more Victorian values
and so on. Well it is a very important moment when a brusquer, tougher,
more organised version of this consensus comes into office with Wilson, and
at that point people then talk, not about, as they talked in the Macmillan
period, perhaps a hundred years of conservatism, but about the social dem-
ocratic millennium. Why it ever Because you see one of the most
important things that Wilson was able to do, which Macmillan never could
and which Heath, when he tried, also failed to do, was to bring into that
consensus -

not just to hold the general allegiance of the Labour movement

12
and the working class to it but to bring it actively into its centre. It is the
-

beginning of the debate about voluntary wage restraint, which is conducted

in the arena of the TUC and the Labour Party and leads to the succession of
incomes policies which the Labour government introduced.

Now the reason why people thought the consensus would hold up forever was
not just because they liked it, but it was partly because they thought is best
represented the forms in which modern advanced capitalism could be politi-
cally managed. What they said was, we are not in the era any longer of the
small firm and the little entrepreneurial group -

we are in the period of

modem, corporately managed increasingly international capital. The interlog
of the managers of corporate capitalism are the managers of the corporate
state. Those two understand one another in the way in which neither understand
the little old lady who is still clipping her entrepreneurial coupons out in the
margins. She needs to have some base of life from capital, but she is not the
collective brain of capital -

the collective brain of capital lives on the top

floor of the Shell building, and they speak best to the top floor of the Treasury
and both of them dine every week with the top floor of the BBC. And those
three corporate establishments, especially if you could add the top floor of
the Look like bringing together the major corporate sections. What about
the people? The people will be represented, of course, by the State. What is
the point in having a huge, universal-suffrage democratic state without allow-
ing the state to enter the bargain. And if you tie up, in a single set of discussions
in Downing Street around a single plate of sandwiches, the top floor of the
TUC representing Labour, the top floor of the CBI representing capital, and
the top floor of the state representing the people -

who else is left? Well

there are a few blacks around, but they are not yet fully citizens and there
are a lot of women but they are into something else, they are into the telly
and the fridge, and the women’s magazines and the ads and consumption etc.,
beginning to run away with sexual permissiveness and all that, and that is not
the serious business of the white heat of technological revolution. The main
business of the state and the economy in an organized society had found a
political form, and in that period people genuinely felt (I am making a joke
about it, but it was genuine) that the American model of a much more
decentralized and less authoritative intervention of the state in the economy,
was not the right combination of state-capital-labour to manage modem cor-

porate capitalism politically. What you required was very much more the
social democratic mix which was more often to be found in Western Europe
-

of which Britain was one of the most experienced exponents. And that
was the way in which to gather together and handle the contradictions generated

by a modem corporate capitalist society. It was a vision in which the state

was acknowledged to have considerable and extensive rights of a Keynesian
or neo-Keynesian kind in the management of the economy.

13
Now, all of that of course dwindled and deteriorated -

it came under in-

creasing attack in the first and second periods of the Labour government.
Gradually every element in that historic compromise was exposed to much
more serious and severe contradictions and pressures partly from world,
-

partly from internal, forces than

-

had ever been expected. It ceased to be

able to deliver, first of all it couldn’t deliver the level of wages which had
been struck by the strong elements in the trade unions in the ’50s and early
’60s. Then it couldn’t deliver on the welfare state to anything like that extent,
then it couldn’t deliver on investment in the infrastructure of the economy,
then it couldn’t deliver anything on prices, because although it was a mixed
economy, one bit of it was considerably more mixed than the other. Then it
couldn’t deliver on improving the education system, it brought in compre-
hensive schools, but it was unable to make the education system function
anything like equally or evenly across the board. And what had begun as a
very positive investment in consensus gradually became, by the time we get
to the Heath period first of all, (well actually -

people now argue as to when

the cracks begin to show). Yes, but they certainly are beginning to show in
1964, yes, they are even more on board in 1966, that is the point when the
Prime Minister has to mobilize his political clout in order to end the seamen’s
strike and when he is driven into talking about &dquo;a small group of politically
motivated mean, &dquo; which some people thought ought to describe the Cabinet
rather than the leadership of the seamen’s union. Or the point when the weight
of the party is mobilized against the labour movement. Or the point when the
weight of the government, a Labour government, is mobilized in order to
discipline and restrain the push for wages in the mid’60s and ’70s. Or the
point when, after the visit, the gentle visit of the IMF, and the oil hike in
1975 it is Mr. Who is to be heard saying, &dquo;I’ve read this extremely
interesting book by a man called Milton Friedman and he seems to be doing
interesting things down there in Chile and the Chicago school ought to be
more carefully attended to, and why don’t we have just a little touch of

monetarism, and cost limits, and a bit of cutting of public expenditure, and
a good deal of control of the rise in money supply&dquo; -

and by the end of that

phase it is Labour that is associated with disciplining the class and it is Labour
which is associated with cutting the welfare state, and it is Labour which is
associated with not creating equality of education, and it is Labour which is
concerned or associated with the bureaucratic management of the welfare
state. Every old age pensioner and every young person who turns up at the
DHSS and is treated like a client -

who is not treated like a client even, who

is treated as an interloper -
I mean the I~I~SS works best (this is the Depart-
ment of Health and Social Security which is responsible for paying vast
numbers of benefits) it is. held to work best when nobod)7 comes into it at all,
and staff and the operations of DHSS you know, kind of grind round, &dquo;Who
are you?&dquo;, &dquo;I have come to collect my rights . &dquo; Well the language of rights

disappeared from this field very rapidly. &dquo;I have come to get my pension,&dquo;

14
said the people looking down to the floor, modestly appearing, cap in hand.
This was the respectable poor at the gate of the welfare state. Which welfare
state? The Labour welfare state. Because Labour had an approach in which,
even when it sustained the welfare state at a much higher level of spending,
it did not introduce any notion into the functioning of the welfare state, that
here were people whose rights had been guaranteed under the historic com-
promise, and consequently their modality of the operation of the state ought
to feel different from how it was under the old Poor Law. So, in a number
of ways, in actual daily experience, substantial sectors of the working class
were disaffiliated from the promise of the historic compromise.

Okay, by now you are looking at the paper because you are wondering what
about TL :heroism. I am already talking about ’Thatcherism. Thatcherism
didn’t appear out of the blue, it didn’t come from outer space, it wasn’t even
generated in Chicago, it doesn’t for the first time appear when Mrs. Thatcher
appears. It appears exactly in the political space which is being evacuated.
It is the empty territory. It is the contradictory experience. It is the negative
view. It is that which has riveted the notion of the Labour movement to a
popular conception of the trade unions as a backward set of institutions,
defending a tiny space at cost to the rest of the population. It is identified
with the state or state interventionist forms of social democracy, which con-
stitute in people’s mind, the bureaucracy, and they are not particularly con-
cerned whether they are being told what to do by a Labour bureaucracy as
opposed to a Conservative bureaucracy. So a great deal of all that popular
understanding of why we had gone into the welfare state, why it was a good
thing, why we would never go back etc., constituted now a potential open
space for the new gospel.

It is not, it seems to me, until you understand how politics moves, not by the
total replacement of one set of practices by another, but by the constitution
and dis-constitution, formation and destruction of competing or conflicting
political forces that you can understand the problem. The very spaces opened
are the spaces into which Thatcherism fitted. It pointed to the welfare state
and it said, &dquo;now, you don’t like being bossed around, because the English
have been free at least ever since Magna Carta. &dquo; Most people think they have
been the free-est people on earth since Anglo-saxon times -

it is given down
by God that we are to have free-born English rights!

Now, they said, the whole nature of a complex bureaucracy which stands
between you and the things that you are &dquo;owed and dued&dquo;, you know, this
is the way in which freedom is dismantled. Of course nobody wants to
dismantle freedom, but you start by setting up the bureaucracy and you give
them more power and you allow them to raise heavy taxes and before you
turn around you are in East Germany. There is some sort of slide which goes

15
without ever noticing it, the &dquo;slide into collectivism&dquo; it was called. We were

sliding into ruthless collectivism without even knowing it. Grounded on the
yews, quite deeply-rooted in the political culture, notion of the people that
they clid have certain important freedoms and rights that they had never had
before, that other people didn’t have, didn’t enjoy. And when you attach to
that the notion that you would be much freer if, instead of somebody in
Whitehall or the local authority taking it away from you in the form of taxation
and rates, they just gave all of it back to you and you are perfectly responsible,
modem citizens and you know how much health insurance you want: you can
buy it; you know what kind of welfare benefits you need to store for old age:
buy it, why should the state buy it for y®u‘l And provide it for you in a
particularly bureaucratic form. I mean there is a very interesting case here
of education, which is enormously instructive. There is a public, state, com-
prehensive system. The internal structural problems of creating a genuinely
equal arena of educational provision having never been tackled, everybody
in an area like London, especially middle class parents, have in the back of
their head a map of the entire education system. They know where the catch-
ment areas cross, they know what are the intersecting roads, they never buy
a house or rent a flat without working out what is the radius in relation to the
best, whitest school around. So that the so-called public education system has
been riddled, throughout these 20 years, with an informal private map, and
everybody knows it they are all edging, Johnny or Joan or whoever it is,
-

across the Kilbum Highroad and round to that Private school rather than that,
and opening the door into Camden Girls or sending them up the hill to
Parliament Hill Field. What is Parliament Hill Field? Well, it looks like a
normal comprehensive school, but it isn’t, it is an old Church of England
Grammar School and the teachers there do know what standards are like and
they are liable to be able to give my child, in an increasingly competitive
world, the kind of launching platform that they require to get into the upper
reaches of the education system and the more education is cut, and the
-

more teachers abandon the schools in the inner city areas and the more the
9
blacks flood in, the more important it is to know which are ’&dquo;the good schools
-

in the state systems.

Another case -

increasingly women go to work. They go to work but are

still left with the responsibility of the medical care of their children. They
then have a choice do they go to the local doctor and queue up for three
-

hours, losing part-time wages all the time, or can they buy themselves into
the dispensary at 9 o’clock in the morning, get something for the kid’s snotty
nose, leave at 5 past 9, drop it off and be at work, and lose half an h®a~r‘1
Well, you can only do that if you are prepared every now and again to skip
over the barrier between the public health system and the private one. In other

w®rds, there was never a transformation of all those areas; there was a kind
of imposition of social responsiblity, imposed on top of them, but there was

16
never an internal transformation. And Labour got away with saying we are
bringing about the slow evolution to the modern world, as a matter of rhetoric,
forgetting that people don’t experience rhetoric, they experience their real
conditions, they experience the crowded health service and so on. Conse-
quently when another version, another political version, occupies the space,
takes advantage of the retreats which are being waged all round, builds itself
directly into the contradictions which already exist in the fabric of the society -
and the most important thing about Thatcherism is that it was not interested
in another political view, it was interested in contestation. It wanted to take
on the welfare state, head on. Even if it doesn’t want to wind it up, it wants
to undermine the principle because it understands that that whole political
formation depended on a principled acclamation, a principled allegiance to
the welfare state. So there is a pamphlet which has just been produced by the
Centre for Policy Studies, which is one of the many ’think tanks’ organized
by monetarism. I could talk a lot about that, about the degree to which social
democracy thought that the compromise they establish would work automat-
ically for us, and the awareness of monetarism that it would have to construct
an alternative economic perspective and the way in which systematically it
constructed ’organic intellectuals’ at the London Business School, organic
researchers at the Centre for Policy Studies and the Institute of Economic
Affairs, organic populace in the Daily Mail, inorganic media men on Panorama
-

it gradually, over 10 years brought these together.

Monetarism understands what hegemony is. It understands that if you are

going to really transform society, you have to transform it on every front.
You have to produce a possible point of identity for every important section
in the society. Monetarism made the Conservative party, for the first time,
establish an Anglo-Caribbean society. To bring deeply into the conservative
party the black-middle class. Previously, both parties had pretended that the
cities weren’t full of black people. Monetarism understands you have to have
intellectuals, you have to have populace; it went forward on the political
programme, headed up by Sir Keith Joseph. Sir Keith Joseph is the mentor
of the Centre for Policy Studies, he got the money out of business to set these
people to work producing the pamphlets saying ’we can tell you about a good
health service within the public. We can tell you how to get good benefits
which are private, we can tell you how to get vouchers which will increase
people’s choices inside education. &dquo; Putting out those ideas first of all they
-

sounded weird and wild -

shortly they were becoming quite respectable

alternatives. By now, they lay the foundations of the popular support of
monetarist policies. So one can talk about the organization of the ideological
field. Labour in this period doesn’t have a daily paper of any kind, left, right
or centre. Labour people read The Guardian and pray. They just hope that
The Guardian line (which is wobbly enough) won’t disintegrate on them
-

and the notion of constructing public opinion or fighting off a reactionary

17
public opinion is not within its horizon. It has never had a theoretical journal.
It has never had a distinct organization of intellectuals apart from in some of
the social welfare areas. It doesn’t know how to organize the ideological field
for a struggle.

But monetarism, in the arena of offering people identifications, has managed

to construct a set of possible positions for all the constituencies in the society,
and to connect them together, so that the worried mother is also the woman
who really understands that her place is at home. She is the person who wants
benefits of a certain kind, and doesn’t want to be held up by the bureaucracy,
who has always been more really understood in her traditional guise by the
Conservative party, who is opposed to the trend of middle class permissiveness
which is run through the progressive sectors of the middle class in the last
20 or 30 years, who thinks that to talk about a right for abortion is a pretty
scandalous thing. And if you can connect the sexual identity with the welfare
identity with the education identity with the economic identity with the political
identity you can construct a set of possible positions which are not false
consciousness. It is not that these women or men are walking around with
the shadow of ignorance on their minds, when you turn the key of revolution
the shutters will go up and you will see straight through to the end of the line;
they are just calculating their chances. And they suddenly think that the
calculations we made in the last 25 years haven’t turned out so good, and
I’ve about 20 more years to go and perh~ps I’d better bet on the other side.
It is not my s_idc? Well, it is, isn’t it? And addressed to that, monetarism has
proved itself -

I’ve talked about Sir Keith Joseph as the organiser of the

intellectual field. But when it looked as if the Conservatives might go into
the election with Sir Keith Joseph, they sent him up to >3irrnin~h~rn to make
a set of policy speeches and the first thing he thought of saying was, &dquo;well
we really did need some care and discipline in the welfare area, because of
course there were a lot of class C, D, families that couldn’t organize themselves
9
too well and went on having too many children and living off the dole.&dquo;
’Uproar in the Hall in Birmingham, down in Conservative Central Service
Office they decided he would not do. Why w®nldn’t he do? Because you
needed a popular language -

you needed somebody who could connect the

policies of monetarism, in its complexities with the ordinary popular
imagination.
The name of that connection is Mrs. Thatcher. She doesn’t have the great
ideas; she did read Hayek’s book back there in 1 47 48, when it was being
-

widely read. (There is a wonderful review of Hayek’s book by Orwell.)

Everybody was reading it at a certain point in time she did read it, she
-

talks to Sir Keith Joseph and he talks to the philosophers, so the ideas trickle
down, they all talk to Oakeshotí or Friedman or Hayek, or people in the
Business School, or the economists at Liverpool or people at Cambridge and

18
so on, there is a wide network of support, but actually to win the masses, the

hearts and minds of the Labour masses, you have to have a popular language,
and she has it, she has the popular touch, she knows how to present the
economy as functioning like the household budget. &dquo;You can’t spend more
than you have in the kitty,&dquo; she knows how to talk to women at home, in
their most traditionalist guise. She knows how to fend off that bit of them
which would quite like to get into a new kind of life, and to restore them to
their Victorian place in the world. She knows how to construct that popular
idiom. And the combination of a political formation which has been riddled
from the inside and has evacuated territory, with an aggressively advancing
political philosophy which occupies exactly the spaces which have been va-
cated, and which is capable of collecting policies which look as if they are
addressed to the strategic position of the whole society with a capacity to
become popular, to become common-sensical, to become the idiom of ordinary
practical thought, is a powerful political combination. It will make advances
in the heartland of a labour movement, it will find supporters in men and
women in the working class, it will rally old-style Keynesians and bring them
over to the monetarist side. And one of the things Mrs. Thatcher advanced
into government on the basis of, was opposition to the state. Hers is a true
populism, what she says is: &dquo;the state is full of these civil servants who have
stupid Keynesian notions in their head, and we are going to act against them,
we are going to change their minds, we have to conduct a kind of struggle,
&dquo;
with popular support, against them. And she did.

That is the form in which Thatcherism didn’t become popular, it is not that
there are pure Thatcherite people in the society, people in that sense are open
to very different political constructions, they are open to be won to different
parties and political programmes. They found the means of addressing exactly
the weakness of a previous political formation and of constructing an alter-
native formation in its place. Now I think that is not only what the process
has been like as one moves from ’45 to ’~3, but that it also disturbs and
undermines a lot of our common-sense wisdom about what the relationship
is between classes and form, classes and political parties, ideology and material
forces and so on. It drives a wedge into a great deal of the political common
sense that most of us bring to the analysis of the situation; particularly common
sense notions of ’false consciousness’, and so on.

*
This is the edited text of a talk given at Monash University, Melbourne, on 15th April, 1983.
Stuart Hall came to Australia at the invitation of Australian L,eftlZeview, to participate in seminars
commemorating the 100th anniversary of Marx’s death. We acknowledge ALI~’s assistance in
publishing this piece.

19